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UWB - Ultra Wideband Wireless Communication Technology

  1. What is UWB technology?

UWB technology is a wireless carrier communication technology that uses a frequency bandwidth above 1 GHz. It does not use a sine carrier, but uses nanosecond non-sinusoidal narrow pulses to transmit data, so it occupies a large spectrum range. Although wireless communication is used, its data transmission rate can reach hundreds of megabits per second or more. . Using UWB technology can transmit signals in a very wide bandwidth. The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) stipulates that UWB technology is: occupying more than 500MHz of bandwidth in the 3.1~10.6GHz frequency band.

  1. What are the advantages of UWB compared to traditional communication technologies?

The traditional communication method uses a continuous wave signal, that is, a local oscillator generates a continuous high-frequency carrier, and it is necessary to transmit information on the carrier by means of amplitude modulation, frequency modulation, etc., and send it through the antenna. Today's wireless broadcasting, 4G communication, Wi-Fi, etc. all use this method for wireless communication.

The IR-UWB signal does not need to generate a continuous high-frequency carrier, but only needs to generate a pulse with a time shorter than nS level, which can be sent through the antenna. Information that needs to be transmitted can be loaded by changing the amplitude, time, and phase of the pulse, thereby realizing information transmission.

Compared with UWB technology, the more well-known Bluetooth and WiFi communication technologies now have certain disadvantages. Through this picture, you can more intuitively understand the difference between UWB technology and Wi-Fi and Bluetooth technology. In short, the advantages of UWB technology are:

  1. High positioning accuracy: wide bandwidth, strong multipath resolution, anti-interference, and higher resolution for distance than Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.

  2. Fast real-time positioning: UWB's ultra-wideband pulse signal has a bandwidth of nanoseconds, which can realize real-time indoor positioning with low latency, and can instantly sense the movement of the tracked object.

  3. High reliability and security: UWB has low transmit power and wide signal bandwidth, which can be well hidden in other types of signals and environmental noise. Spread spectrum code pulse sequence can be demodulated.

Of course, the three technologies of UWB, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth do not exist in isolation. They can be used at the same time, with complementary advantages. They can bring a variety of positioning and data transmission services to terminal products such as smartphones. Antenna and RF design have high requirements.

Compared with the traditional narrowband system, the UWB system has the advantages of strong penetration, low power consumption, good anti-multipath effect, high security, low system complexity, and can provide precise positioning accuracy. Therefore, UWB technology can be applied to the positioning, tracking and navigation of indoor stationary or moving objects and people, and can provide very precise positioning accuracy. However, the cost is relatively high, the network deployment is complex, and relatively speaking, the application of indoor positioning services is limited.

  1. Specific application scenarios

UWB ultra-wideband technology is very different from traditional communication technology. It does not need to use the carrier in the traditional communication system, but transmits data by sending and receiving extremely narrow pulses with nanoseconds or less, so it has GHz magnitude of bandwidth. The current UWB technology applications can be roughly divided into two categories according to the communication distance:

β‘  Short-distance high-speed applications, the data transmission rate can reach hundreds of megabits per second, mainly to build short-distance high-speed WPAN, home wireless multimedia network and to replace high-speed short-distance wired connections, such as wireless USB and DVD (typical communication distance is 10m );

β‘‘Low-rate applications for medium and long distances (above tens of meters), usually with a data transmission rate of 1Mbit/s, mainly used in wireless sensor networks and low-rate connections. At the same time, UWB technology has developed rapidly in recent years because it can realize high-speed data transmission by using a transceiver with low power consumption and low complexity.

UWB technology uses low-power pulses to transmit data in a very wide spectrum range without causing large interference to conventional narrow-band wireless communication systems, and can fully utilize spectrum resources. The high-speed data transceiver built on the basis of UWB technology has a wider range of uses. It can be used for indoor precise positioning and navigation in various fields, including people and large items, such as valuables storage, mine personnel positioning, robot motion tracking, car basement parking and other systems.

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